You are here

Keynote Talks

Gabriele ANDERST-KOTSIS

Dumb Web, Smart Web, Knowledgable Web

Department of Telekooperation

Johannes Kepler University Linz

Abstract

In February 2011, Watson (IBM super computer) managed to beat two past grand champions on the TV quiz show Jeopardy!. Watson was able to answer questions that require intelligence when done by humans. This marked the first machine to pass the Turing test and started a new era of computing called cognitive computing where computers (modeled after the human brain) learn and interact naturally with people to extend what either humans or machine could do on their own. Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc., using big data technologies, smart Machine Learning and AI algorithms were able to tap into our intensions by predicting what we click, buy, like, dislike, shop, surf, etc.,. This marked the era of smart Web or predictive intelligence where Turing test is reversed and machines now try to figure out who we are, our information needs, our behavioral patterns, the activities we are engaged in and our goals. Together with the torrents of data we leave behind us every time we communicate with the digital eco-system, a new era of human-machine cooperation is starting that gives us millions of potential insights into user experience, marketing, personal tastes, and human behavior. In this talk, we are going to illustrate through motivating cases and research directions the main characteristics of this era and how it can transform the way we interact with the Web to ultimately improve the quality of our lives and gain valuable insights into our affective, mental and physical states.

Biography

Gabriele KOTSIS Gabriele Kotsis was born on October 29th, 1967, in Vienna, Austria. She received her masters degree (1991, honored with the Award of the Austrian Computer Society), her PhD (1995, honored with the Heinz-Zemanek Preis) and the venia docendi in computer science (2000) from the University of Vienna. She was working as a researcher and teacher at the University of Vienna (1991-2001), at the Vienna University for Economics and Business Administration (2001) and at the Copenhagen Business School (2002). Since December 2002 she is holding a full professor position at the Telecooperation Department at the Johannes Kepler University of Linz. Her research interests include performance management of computer systems and networks, workgroup computing, mobile and internet computing, telemedia and telecooperation. Prof. Kotsis is author of numerous publications in international conferences and journals and is co-editor of several books. From April 2003 to April 2007 she was president of the Austrian Computer Society. Since October 2007 she is vice rector for research at the JKU Linz.

Jean-Marc JEZEQUEL

University of Rennes

IRISA

Abstract

The engineering of systems involves many different stakeholders, each with their own domain of expertise. Hence more and more organizations are developing an ever growing number of Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) to allow domain experts to express solutions directly in terms of relevant domain concepts. This new trend raises new challenges about designing not just one DSL but many of them, evolving a set of DSLs and coordinating the use of multiple DSLs. In this talk we explore various dimensions of these challenges, and outline a possible research roadmap for addressing them. We detail one of these challenges, which is the safe reuse of model transformations. Indeed both DSL definition and tooling (eg. checkers, document or code generators, model transformations) require significant development efforts, for a limited audience (by definition), because the current state of the art of Model Driven Engineering still makes it hard to reuse and evolve these definitions and tooling across several DSLs, even when these DSLs are conceptually very close to one other. We outline a new extension to the Kermeta language that leverages Family Polymorphism to allow model polymorphism, inheritance among DSLs, as well as evolution and interoperability of DSLs.

Biography

Jean-Marc JEZEQUEL Jean-Marc JEZEQUEL is a Professor at the University of Rennes and Director of IRISA, the largest public research lab in Informatics in France. His interests include model driven software engineering for software product lines, and specifically component based, dynamically adaptable systems with quality of service constraints, including reliability, performance, timeliness etc. He is the author of several books published by Addison-Wesley and of more than 200 publications in international journals and conferences. He was a member of the steering committees of the AOSD and MODELS conference series. He also served on the editorial boards of IEEE Computer, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, the Journal on Software and Systems, on the Journal on Software and System Modeling and the Journal of Object Technology. He received an engineering degree in Telecommunications from ENSTB in 1986, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Rennes, France, in 1989.

Brigitte JAUMARD

Resilient Optical Network Virtualization

Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSE) Department

Concordia University

Abstract

Cloud computing services are emerging as an essential component of the industry ICT infrastructure and, consequently, one of the fastest growing business opportunities for Internet infrastructure and service providers. Many enterprises are moving their services towards cloud infrastructures. In this rapidly growing market, datacenter (DC) scalability is becoming a major technical challenge for service providers as well as its performance optimization, with a key focus on the network technologies and their control. In fact, service providers have to cope with cloud services delivered by more and more geographically distributed DCs, ever increasing requests by users and DC providers for very high throughputs and low latencies, resource dynamicity and elasticity (i.e. flexible storage and computing on demand) and seamless resource/service migration. The future Internet architecture needs to offer:

An efficient integration between the high-performance and high-bandwidth optical network infrastructure of operators and services/resources provided by DCs and server farms.

A highly resilient virtual infrastructure as a major disadvantage of a virtual architecture is that a single hardware fault or a defect in the virtualization infrastructure (VI) software can lead to the failure of multiple virtual nodes by, for example, preventing VMs from being scheduled or preventing VMs from accessing I/O devices. Hence, a key to enabling the deployment of virtual clusters is to enhance the resiliency of the VI to faults in the hardware or virtualization software.

Biography

Brigitte JAUMARD Brigitte JAUMARD holds a Concordia University Research Chair, Tier 1, on the Optimization of Communication Networks in the Computer Science and Software Engineering (CSE) Department at Concordia University. Her research focuses on mathematical modeling and algorithm design for large-scale optimization problems arising in communication networks, transportation networks and artificial intelligence. Recent studies include the design of the most efficient algorithms for p-cycle based protection schemes, under static and dynamic traffic, and their generalization to the so-called p-structures, which encompass all previously proposed pre-cross-connected preconfigured protection schemes. Other recent studies deal with dimensioning, provisioning and scheduling algorithms in optical grids or clouds, in broadband wireless networks and in passive optical networks. In Artificial Intelligence, contributions include the development of efficient optimization algorithms for probabilistic logic (reasoning under uncertainty) and for automated mechanical design in social networks (design of trust estimator tools). In transportation, her recent contributions include new algorithms for freight train scheduling and locomotive assignment. B. Jaumard has published over 300 papers in international journals in Operations Research and in Telecommunications.

Edgar WEIPPL

SBA Research

Vienna University of Technology

Abstract

Social Engineering has long been a very effective means of attacking information systems. The term knowledge worker has been coined by Peter Drucker more than 50 years ago and still describes very well the basic characteristics of many employees. Today, with current hypes such as BYOD (bring your own device) and public cloud services, young professionals expect to use the same technology both in their private life and while working. In global companies teams are no longer geographically co-located but staffed globally just-in-time. The decrease in personal interaction combined with the plethora of tools used (E-Mail, IM, Skype, Dropbox, Linked-In, Lync, etc.) create new opportunities for attackers. As recent attacks on companies such as the New York Times, RSA or Apple have shown, targeted spear-phishing attacks are an effective evolution of social engineering attacks. When combined with spear phishing to distribute zero-day-exploits they become a dangerous weapon, often used by advanced persistent threats. In this talk we will explore some attack vectors and possible steps to mitigate the risk.

Biography

Edgar WEIPPL After graduating with a Ph.D. from the Vienna University of Technology, Edgar worked for two years in a research startup. He then spent one year teaching as an assistant professor at Beloit College, WI. From 2002 to 2004, while with the software vendor, he worked as a consultant in New York, NY and Albany, NY, and in Frankfurt, Germany. In 2004 he joined the Vienna University of Technology and founded together with A Min Tjoa and Markus Klemen the research center SBA Research. Edgar R. Weippl (CISSP, CISA, CISM, CRISC, CSSLP, CMC) is member of the editorial board of Computers & Security (COSE) and he organizes the ARES conference.